What NBN needs is much more networking

NBN Co's loss blew out from just under $400 million to $714 million in the December half but that doesn't shed much light on what is happening as executive chairman Ziggy Switkowski and a new management team reshape Australia's biggest infrastructure project.

Operational and financial comparisons with previous periods are basically meaningless: the national broadband network has been fundamentally changed by the Coalition's decision to replace Labor's fibre-to-the-home rollout with a melange of connections, including fibre-to-neighbourhood ''nodes'' and hybrid fibre cable originally set to be sidelined.

But the half-year result does provide a new base for assessing the progress of the massive project. It's the first results briefing by the NBN and possibly the first of its kind by a government-owned enterprise, Switkowski says.

NBN Co will be reporting on its operations every quarter and on its financial results every half year from now on, and the next briefing will be fronted by NBN Co's chief executive in waiting, Vodafone Hutchison Australia boss Bill Morrow.

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He will join the NBN on April 2, and is a turnaround expert who was flown in by Vodafone Hutchison in March 2012 to fix network coverage problems that were driving mobile phone users away in droves.

He upgraded the network, got the company into the 4G mobile market battle and launched data-heavy subscription plans.

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Vodafone Hutchison lost 1.6 million customers in the year to September before he got traction, including 584,000 customers in the September quarter alone.

In the December quarter it lost just 22,000 subscribers, however, and it was adding subscribers by year's end.

The recovery job Morrow is taking on at the NBN is larger and more complicated.

At Vodafone Hutchinson Australia he had two savvy corporate masters - the giant Vodafone group and Hutchison, the telecommunications company controlled by Hong Kong magnate Li Ka-shing. The task was also linear: first, end a period of denial about the extent of the network's coverage problems. Second, come up with a plan to fix them. Third, cost the job and fourth, get it done, using funds supplied by the owners. Fifth and finally, relaunch the brand with some snazzy offers.

The NBN has only one owner, the Commonwealth government, but it has several other interested parties, including Telecommunications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, their departments and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

Morrow needs a new financial plan and a new business plan: both will come this year and are contingent on the final shape of the hybrid network.

That in turn is linked to a rewrite of Telstra's deal with the NBN to co-operate with the fibre network rollout. NBN Co's head of strategy, former senior Telstra executive JB Rousselot, will handle negotiations day to day but representatives of the finance and communications departments and representatives of the two ministers will also be in the room to make sure it all goes as planned.

Details to be thrashed out include whether or not to rent or buy Telstra copper wire to get fibre from neighbourhood nodes to premises (the copper wire would have been replaced in Labor's fibre to the home rollout).

In trials the NBN is leasing but it can probably rent or buy as long as it does two things - keep Telstra happy by maintaining the $11 billion ''dollars of the day'' value of the original deal in 2012 and keep the government happy by not paying Telstra a cent more.

The briefing the NBN gave on Friday underlined, however, that what Bill Morrow needs to do most is get some predictability into the broadband rollout.

When asked whether the NBN could ever be built on time and budget, NBN Co's previous chief executive, Mike Quigley, used to describe how a ''modular'' construction system would in time result in rollout speed increasing and rollout cost declining.

Switkowski refers to it as a cookie-cutter effect: the network is rolling out in what the NBN calls ''fibre serving access modules'' (FSAMs) that contain about 3000 premises. Costs are high and execution times are slow in the early stages, because the NBN and its private-sector construction partners are on a learning curve. Failures and successes in each rollout stage are instructive, however. Lessons are learnt, changes are made and the rollout becomes progressively more efficient.

It hasn't happened to any significant extent for the NBN so far, however, and one of the reasons was pinpointed on Friday by Greg Adcock, the former executive director of NBN and commercial operations at Telstra who was hired as NBN Co's chief operating officer in November.

He showed a monthly graph of NBN construction activity over the past two years. It increases overall but the number of FSAMs being worked on fluctuates wildly. If that continues, a ramp-up that builds ''cookie-cutter'' efficiencies is much more difficult to achieve.

''I am not standing here apportioning blame,'' Adcock said, ''just dealing with the facts that over the past couple of years stability and certainty appear to have been the missing elements at most points in the supply chain.''

He and Morrow will work with key contractors to fix the problem: they have to succeed to get the broadband project back on the rails.